Fast Vietnamese food from Pho Saigon Express

Pho Saigon Express has at least two things on its menu you might
not expect to find in a Vietnamese restaurant: words in Spanish and
words in Chinese.

"We want everybody to understand the menu," said restaurant
manager Priscilla Bui. "We're looking to serve everybody in the
region. There's a mix of different types of people who come to our
restaurant."

Many people don't know the difference between Dac Biet Xe Lua
(Combo Beef Noodle Soup) and Com Tam Thit Nuong (Broken Rice With
BBQ Pork), so the menu provides multilingual descriptions of both
as well as more than 60 other items.

Pho (rhymes with "duh," as explained in the restaurant's Web
site), is a soup of rice noodles and beef broth. The soup is so
popular that it often is included in the names of Vietnamese
restaurants. Besides Pho Saigon Express, Escondido also has Pho
Hong Cali, Rancho Bernardo has Pho Hoacali Express, Vista has Pho
Little Saigon and the chain Pho Hoa has several restaurants in the
county.

While all the restaurants serve pho, not all pho is the
same.

"There's a lot of ways you can cook pho," Bui said. "Ours is
more a typical authentic southern Vietnamese noodle soup. If you go
to each one of the regions, pho is different. Our has more of a
sweet taste to it. Others are more of a salty taste. We use a lot
of bones in our soup, and we cook it for a long time. Hours and
hours."

Bui works as a data-base engineer and in real estate when not
staffing the counter during lunch and dinner hours. She said Pho
Saigon Express, which opened in November 2005, is an outgrowth of
businesses run by her mother and aunt.

Bui came to the United States 20 years ago with her mother, who
brought the family's recipes from Vietnam.

"We keep the recipes in the family," she said. "We cook every
pot ourselves."

The most popular pho, Dac Biet Xe Lua, is a combination bowl
with slices of rare steak, well-done brisket, flank, tendon and
tripe for $5.50. Most pho bowls are $4.75, and the most expensive
is a large $6.25 bowl of Pho Tom, or rice noodles with seafood.

Appetizers are priced from $3.25 to $4.95 and include egg rolls,
spring rolls, and green papaya salad with shrimp and pork or beef
jerky.